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"Madness in Novels," an 1866 spectator review of Mrs. Henry Wood's St. Martin 's Eve, sharply criticizes her portrayal of Charlotte Norris, a character who suffers from an acute case of insane jealousy. According to the reviewer, Wood's representation of madness is deeply flawed, for she merely uses Charlotte's mental disorder as a sensational plot device and does not treat it as a psychological problem. The reviewer then calls for a novelist with a superior talent for characterization, a novelist such as Anthony Trollope, to provide a more psychologically complex portrait of mental aberration. Wood, he writes, "wants to paint jealousy in its extreme forms, and she has not of course the power to create Othello, or the art to paint, as Thackeray or Trollope might have done, the morbid passion in its naturalistic nineteenth-century dress."
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P. D. Edwards has speculated that these words may have been the germ of Trollope's 1869 novel He Knew He Was Right.
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The main plot of the novel revolving around Louis Trevelyan's seemingly mad suspicions about his wife Emily's relationship with the elderly Colonel Osborne can indeed be called Trollope's St. Martin's Eve. Through his depiction of Trevelyan's descent into a jealous rage, Trollope demonstrates how the depiction of madness in fiction can be related to the questions of personal identity underlying the Victorian legal doctrine of criminal insanity--the doctrine which defined insanity as not knowing right from wrong. Trollope, it appears, follows that reviewer's suggestions quite literally, for he portrays a character alienated from himself by an inability to know right from wrong and suggests that that alienation within the character even produces a profound alienation within the narrative fabric of the novel itself. In the end Trevelyan becomes a character who is both himself, a sane Victorian gentleman, and a mad Othello in nineteenth-century dress, and He Knew He Was Right becomes a narrative that is at once a "sane" realistic novel and a "mad" Shakespearean tragedy.
Trollope's fiction, as many critics have noted, emphasizes character over plot, focusing upon how character is formed within a narrative.
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As he writes in An Autobiography, "The depth and breadth, the narrowness and shallowness of each
character
should be clear" to the novelist.
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The novelist's...